Traffic

February 18, 2009

Top 10 list of UK PR people on Twitter

Sometimes a brand needs to consider how they measure the quality of their online mentions - quantitative analysis of a campaign just isn't enough. It's something that was debated at length at the London MeasurementCamp working group this morning. As there's no such thing as AEV for mentions on Twitter, one way you can do it is to use Twitter Grader. At this morning's session we talked about how to segment tiers of online coverage of a story, and how, on Twitter, Twitter Grader can be used to do this.

For example, your story is picked up by 50 people on Twitter, 20 of which are tier one (top notch), the rest tier two (little reach or influence). So as a measure, you'd look to improve how many tier one Twitter mentions you get for the next story. To give yourself a target that can be measured. It's applying traditional segmentation to the Twitterspere.

Here is an up to date top 10 for the PR industry on Twitter, which I've compiled using Twitter Grader. I'll leave a top 100 to someone else. Watch our for Peter Hay at PR Week who may be working on something bigger also. Rank in brackets is the person's old position.

Comments

While it's great to see an attempt to offer a one-stop reference point for UK PR influencers, unfortunately it falls down a little bit.

The problem is that you're using Twitter Grader which is nothing more than a fun little toy. It doesn't offer any *real* authority, since it doesn't take into account spammy tweets, benefits to community, bot followers, etc.

There are some tremendous UK PR people on Twitter for sure, and they probably don't show up on this list because of its use of Twitter Grader.

A more authentic approach would be to use analytics to study the PR person's use of Twitter, how they're benefiting their clients through it, expanding their brand and more.

Hi Drew - Thanks for putting this together and for the reference. It's great that you bring this up in reference to MeasurementCamp. While I still haven't been to one, I'm pretty convinced that if a way to present twitter "value" as part of a communication is going to be created, it will come from that initiative!

I think what this list shows is that there are a good number of UK PR professionals who "get twitter", which is what really matters. It's actually relatively difficult to get a twitter grade below 80... even @daniellelloyd (171 followers, 0 following, 2 updates) has a grade of 88. So when the top 10 are separated by just 0.37%, who knows how and why Grader is making those differentiations?

Hello Drew, I think this is a great list, more so as a run-down of people to follow for anyone starting out.

Just to make two points that have already been touched upon. Yes you’ve created a monster! And Twitter Grader is flawed and easy to game.

One of the ways Twitter Grader scores you is based on your friend / follower ratio. Now everyone currently in your list is reputable and wouldn’t do this, but it is easy to up your score simply by unfriending a whole load of people so your ratio is suddenly 300 friends to 3000 followers or whatever.

Effectively you are also penalised for following most people back who follow you – something a lot of us do out of politeness and curiosity.

This kind of mass unfriending to game Twitter Grader happens quite a bit in the US and Joel Postman wrote a strong piece about it (http://bit.ly/tK3AsP).

I don’t have an alternative to put forward and I know Twitter Grader is really all there is. But as everyone loves a league table, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day soon some mystery entrants pop up here!